Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to methods for managing a power line communication network in multi-flow environments. More particularly, the present disclosure is related to using spatial reuse capability for managing a power line communication network in multi-flow environments.
Description of the Related Art
Internet connectivity is becoming a vital requirement in several business segments and conventional enterprises, such as retail, healthcare, industrial automation and warehousing. Deploying an Ethernet backhaul in many of these new environments may not be a cost-effective option. Availability of power line networks can be leveraged to serve as a cost-effective backhaul in such cases. Specifically, in several of these applications, the data access patterns are not just with respect to the internet through a gateway node, but involve a large amount of local, peer-to-peer traffic. Examples include transferring health records between medical devices and IT servers in hospitals, video surveillance data between cameras and storage servers in retail/warehouses, etc.
Generally, Power Line Communication (PLC) is a communication technology that enables sending data over existing power cables. PLCs provide high bandwidth connectivity, typically up to 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbps), in settings where there is no built-in network infrastructure. While power line networks may be used for broadband communication, current PLC networks are not capable of supporting a multitude of data flow operations delivering high throughput.
Although the performance of PLC is stable, such that throughput quality does not fluctuate and can deliver high rates (e.g., 100's of Mbps) on individual links operating in isolation, the performance of PLC degrades significantly in multi-flow environments (e.g., providing only tens of Mbps or lower) with increasing number of flows operating at the application layer. Hidden terminals in the PLC may be responsible for this degradation, even in the presence of a medium access (MAC) layer. Hidden terminals arise when two transmitters, that cannot hear each other, transmit simultaneously and cause collisions at a receiver. Design of new mechanisms, such as Request to Send (RTS) and Cleared to Send (CTS) mechanisms, to make a medium access (MAC) layer robust to the PLC channel would not only incur overhead, but would also necessitate modifications to the PLC specifications and adapters and hence may be incompatible with current PLC products.